Mrs Atkins from Hanbury Street was a fading flower, just twenty-four and without Mr Atkins now for three months or more. He had found himself unequal to the responsibilities of family life and left her to it, with their three children and her opium habit to feed (the latter taking priority as is customary in this tortured world) and a baby on the way–having been busy up until the very moment of his departure, that particular aspect of their relations unaffected by the wretchedness of the rest.
The baby, when his turn came, was very small and took several minutes to draw his first sickly breath. He seemed doomed from the start and died before the week was out, having neither hunger nor interest in living to inspire him. The others, meanwhile, suffered their betrayed and broken slap-happy mother, scratching around for their own food, lifting her head from puddles in the gutter when they found her. They would sit and guard her until she came to and cried at them for being there, hugging them too hard, and then, guilt done for another day, would scrape herself up off the pavement and back into the crowd, promising to come back in a moment with ice cream.
Daisy had spotted the Atkins girls, and remarked that they walked sadly and looked as though they were frightened and had no friends. Grace had seen their mother talking to Sally Ann in the Ten Bells and she looked much as the girls did. The next week Billy reported that there was also a small boy in the Atkins house, not more than two or three years old. He was evidently alone, left to the care of his sisters, whom Billy had seen begging in Brick Lane–their ma had not been home for two days, and they had left him as they were all hungry and he was too heavy to carry. Grace and Daisy went to Hanbury Street and found him chewing an old mutton bone, damp and reeking. They gathered him up and left a note, with their address, hoping the recipient could read it.
‘His name is Tom,’ said Daisy, helpfully.
‘Have you seen him before?’
‘Only through the window. He was playing by himself.’
‘Come on, Tom. Come and have a nice bath.’
‘Can we wash him?’
‘Yes, we can. He seems to like us all right.’
‘He smells. Can we keep him?’
‘Hold your horses there, Miss Daisy. Let’s wash him first and talk to his ma.’
If Tom had ever had a bath before he had forgotten it: he shrieked with fear at first and then delight as he felt the warm water. Daisy and Jake found this hilarious and they caught the giggles. They washed him sweetly with a flannel, carefully around the scabby patches, and showed him how to splash. It made a very cosy scene and Grace quietly prayed she wasn’t up the duff. Then they got him out and dried him by the fire, and combed the lice out of his hair.
‘Jake, can you run round to Hanbury Street and wait for his sisters to come home?’
‘They’re called Annie and Kate. Annie is nine and Kate is seven.’
‘Thank you, Daisy. When they come home, bring them here. When Billy gets back I’ll send him to wait with you.’
And so it was that the Atkins children came to stay with the Hammers. When Jake returned with the girls, wide-eyed like rabbits, she sent Billy to wait for Mrs Atkins to come home.
‘Her name is Mary Jane,’ said Daisy, ‘but I don’t know how old she is.’
Mary Jane never got home that night or the next. The landlord came to throw her out on Wednesday but went away again. The children found her dead in her bed on Thursday morning. Tom still hadn’t seemed to notice she wasn’t there. The thin, haunted girls came back with Billy’s arms round them.
‘Will you go over, Ma? I’ll watch them.’
Grace found Mary Jane Atkins stone cold and stiff on her filthy bed in her boots and hat. She had choked on the vomit that had dried down her dead neck, and her face was waxen and grey. Mercifully her eyes were shut. A fly droned above them, banging into the windowpane. Grace took her possessions, such as they were: a hat with a tattered bird perched on the brim, ragged children’s clothes, some shells from the seaside. She looked at Mary Jane’s fingers for a wedding ring but, of course, it had gone to the pawnshop long ago. Then she stroked her, just lightly, on the arm and the cheek, to touch her before she went into the earth. Her skin was frigid, blood pooled along the back of her hands and arms, turning a purple pattern on the pale flesh. She was taken away the next morning, in a box with rope handles.
For the next three days Annie and Kate, who was the image of her mother, were ghostly figures who drifted round the Hammer home, soundless, with empty faces. Daisy exerted the full power of her hospitality, making encouraging conversation, involving them in games and anything else she thought would make them feel better. They could not be persuaded to leave the house, not for cricket or catch, or even just to sit in the street, and clung round Grace as close as they could without actually touching her. Charlie had given up his bed quite cheerfully to his brothers, who with Grace, had forgone their place in the big bed so that tiny Tom and the girls could be comfortable together. This left Charlie and Grace on the floor, which was the only place they could stretch out, and they couldn’t do that for ever. Billy insisted on each of them taking a turn in his place for a night at least, his ma first on Sunday, Charlie Monday. Tuesday they made up a cot for Tom, put the girls top to toe and got back into their beds. Grace lay in the dark in the sleeping room, wondering how they would manage and what she should do for the best.
The Atkins children had not been with the Hammers a week before there was trouble. It came in the vile shape of Mirabel Trotter as she passed by the end of Thrawl Street.
She is a sly piece of work, Mrs Mirabel Trotter, like a great flabby toad lurking under a dank rock, staring out from the gloom at her dinner. She is solid, and square, with the strength of a man to match her temper. She wears a great deal of gold, all of her jewellery at once, it seems, to show off–it does nothing to enhance her appearance save to dazzle the spectator in sunlight. Although she is vulgar in this respect she has a good few impressive connections: various baronets and a duke or two, among other esteemed clients, for whom she herself is the model of discretion, and she leads an enviable life of comfort, her empire stretching across East London. In addition to her quieter interests she owns the greater part of Thrawl, and Flower and Dean Streets, chunks of Hoxton, a lodging-house or two in Bow. She has everything, in fact, except true love, which she heard about long ago and has pursued ever since, finding it elusive, which is not only, as she thinks, because she cannot buy it but also because she is so unfortunate as to lack any personal appeal whatever.
She had spotted the Atkins girls out and about and, not knowing who was looking after them, had engaged the poor innocents in conversation, from which she deduced that their mother was dead and they were staying with a local family for now. They told Grace about the fat, frightening lady in the fancy carriage who had spoken to them, though they tried not to say much; how she had watched after them down the street, waving as they hurried away. Grace knew why the old sow was sizing them up, though they might be all of eight and nine. She told them to stay away from Thrawl Street and asked the boys to keep an eye open.
Sure enough, two days later Billy came racing home, in a breathless panic.
‘Annie’s gone, she’s been snatched.’ He was near to tears, Kate by his side, her eyes like empty dinner plates. Grace grabbed her little hand. ‘Where?’
‘Dorset Street.’
‘What in God’s name were you doing in Dorset Street?’
‘We was taking a short-cut.’
Now Dorset Street, dear reader, is no likely avenue for a quiet stroll or a short-cut to anywhere, though it runs not a hundred and fifty yards long, between Crispin and Commercial Street. It is said by some to be the most notorious street in London. Policemen rarely patrol it and only in pairs. You can find a man for the dirtiest job here; cutthroats and thieves rub shoulders with the grimiest brasses, smoking opium and drinking their filthy London gin. Near one end is an archway that leads through to Miller’s Court, which sounds cheery enough but is really a warren of mouldy rooms and passages, so neglected by sunlight that not even moss can grow on the wet walls, never mind a pot plant–if there was anybody here who might keep such a thing: hideout for the Blind Beggar mob, bitter rivals of the Nicholses, and squalid home to other shady operations and some of the most wretched girls in the parish. A century ago Dorset Street was a clean thoroughfare with fresh air, the wide blue sky and flowers growing at the windows; a century before that, a country lane. It is doomed to be the scene of dark events, though no one can know these things yet. Grace was down there like a flash.
Miss Kelly was the first voice of reason: she had spotted the children round about twelve and told them to get themselves home. Then she’d gone into Miller’s Court for a minute, only just inside the archway, to see that Sally Ann was breathing–she had stumbled in a half-hour before and fallen asleep in the passage. No one wanted to move her as she had walloped Nelly Holland last time for trying to put her to bed, and her eye was still black. Coming out again she had spotted Billy racing down the street with the little one in tow, stumbling to keep up, all the commotion behind them, and Busy Liz Stride hammering with her long arms on the door of MacMurphy’s lodging-house, wailing in Swedish.
Mrs Mirabel Trotter, in all her glittering gold, has plucked Annie Atkins, along with two other girls that day, from the street and they are on their way, terrified, in a plain carriage, to an address in Shoreditch. The journey is tortured and silent. She receives them at the inner door once the gate is firmly locked behind them. She tells them they will be put to work straight away at general household tasks and that they are there by order of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Two of them do not know that this is untrue.
There was one person who could help poor Annie Atkins, and Grace had wasted no time in looking for her. She searched every pub the length of the Whitechapel Road, which was no mean feat, and returned home, where Billy was minding the little ones, to find Charlie and Jake on the doorstep, having scoured Commercial Street all the way to the station and back down Brick Lane, with no joy either. Trixie May Turner, lady of leisure, East End society queen, was not in the neighbourhood that afternoon. Grace wanted to sit down in the road and cry with hopelessness. It was Daisy who suggested the next step: ‘You could ask Jack.’
It was true that he knew everyone. And he seemed a reliable sort, strangely enough, the kind you might turn to in times of trouble.
‘That’s a good idea, darlin’.’ And so it was her turn to find him.
He turned up in the Saracen’s Head, luckily at that moment not charming a lady but cracking rude jokes with Michael Robinson, the landlord. She grasped him by the elbow, a little breathless.
‘Will you run an errand with me, Jack?’
As it happened, Jack knew a thing or two about Miss Trotter; not, as Grace suspected, because he frequents her brothel but because Trixie May Turner was his best friend for drinking and sometime associate. He did not divulge this information for now, expecting she would make something of it, as women in his experience are wont to do. And he happened to know that Trixie was in Canning Town and not due back until after dinner. He had never met the vile Mrs Trotter but her reputation preceded her for miles around, and he felt as if he knew her already more intimately than he would like.
He rejected Grace’s plan to find Mrs Trotter and confront her–a brave idea, but foolish. Mirabel Trotter runs a tight racket and casual callers rub her up the wrong way, which nobody wants to do. Those with troublesome enquiries or pointy fingers are likely to be shown through to the yard, to be dealt with where no one can hear them. Jack was not about to go knocking on the door at Thrawl Street or her fortress in Shoreditch. Furthermore, Annie might not be at either, but at Trotter’s premises in Mile End. Or–though he refrained from saying it–dead in a ditch already. He proposed instead that they visit an acquaintance of his in Limehouse, who is the best source of information on any business in the criminal world, if you can get her to talk. He drained his beer and they left at once.
Jack is a city boy, born and bred in St Olave. His great-grandmother had kept a beautiful tidy cottage in Hanbury Street in the days when Whitechapel had clean air and birdsong, and fields still skirted the district. He remembers her faintly, as if in a dream, her window-boxes the last flash of colour in their street. He may be an unsuitable choice for a consort but he can be a solid friend. He has saved many a day, rescued many a damsel in distress–and not just the young, pretty ones.
He was surprised that Grace asked for his help, having supposed that she was cast iron. They stormed down Commercial Road heading for Limehouse: scene of human degradation, lair of the wicked, axis of criminal activity. It was one of the blacker spots on East London’s face, dark and grey and damp. The wood had rotted on the windows in these bleak streets, eating itself; the buildings were slipping slowly into the marsh, with the people still inside, clustering and scuttling like silverfish.
As they walked past the workhouse at the end of Thomas Street they saw a dead dog in the road.
‘It’s just round the corner and down the alley now,’ he said.
They rounded the corner and stepped from their grimy, stinking surroundings into a rotten place. A narrow, crooked passage, slick with condensation from the sewage on the floor, the sound of thick drops dripping. It smelled of dead things and sickness and shit. Tunnel-like alleyways led off in other directions ahead. This was Blight Street, St Anne, notorious den of thieves and miscreants.
As they picked their way through the slime they passed tiny windows, some dark and soundless, some patched with pathetic rags or greasy brown paper, with a faint light inside and the sound of crying. Just inside a half-open doorway, a baby was asleep on the floor, sucking breaths of fetid air into rattling lungs. Their footsteps squelched under them, someone shrieked in the distance. They climbed some stairs that appeared suddenly from the gloom, feeling the way, passing figures slumped unconscious or dead on the steps. Grace was certain she had stood on someone’s hand. A rotten door appeared at the top and upon knocking they were admitted, after a gruff inquisition through the keyhole.
The creature who opened the door to them was more goblin than woman in appearance and demeanour. She greeted them with a smile that was neither warm nor friendly and hollow black eyes.
‘Good day, Miss Spragg, how nice it is to see you,’ said Jack, tipping his hat, plainly lying but doing very well at it. ‘May I beg a moment of your valuable time?’
‘Why, charming Mr Tallis, can it really be you after all these weeks?’ she replied, with a sickening grin. ‘I had quite forgotten you! What could you be wanting this fine day, I wonder? And who’s this pretty piece?’ She jabbed a vicious claw in Grace’s direction. Grace swallowed the urge to smack her rotten teeth down her throat.
‘This is my good friend Miss Jane Hanbury,’ said he. ‘One of her girls has been taken this morning, in Dorset Street. I’m sure you’ve heard something about it.’
The goblin Spragg laughed nastily, creature of hell, black-hearted. ‘Oh, sure indeed, are you?’ she rasped, through her fit of merriment.
‘I’m sure you will think of something to say,’ he said quietly, ‘when you have heard me out in private.’
She looked a little uneasy suddenly and stepped aside to let them in. Her long skirts covered her feet so she seemed to glide or, rather, to scuttle along. They entered a damp passageway and ascended a flight of rotting stairs, the reek of mildew closing round them. Upstairs a fire hissed in the grate, burning green wood, like the poison tree Grace had read about in some tale or other, most likely Grimm.
‘You. Wait here,’ the goblin told Grace, her eyes cold, black like a spider’s. She waved Jack up another flight. Grace watched their feet disappear. Footsteps crossed the floor above and faded away.
Now Jack, in fact, had nothing on Miss Spragg at all. He was blessed, however, with hypnotic eyes, the crooked gift of effortless deception as he spilled from his mother’s womb. He employs it often for his own casual amusement, dropping confusion here and there like litter: a curse that his sorry victims struggle with, brows knit, until they are buried with it, doubt worrying them under the ground–so that even before the gates of Heaven, as they declare their tally before St Peter, a part of them is caught in perpetual distraction, perplexed by something they cannot remember, wondering what he meant.
Jack fixed Emmeline Spragg with his deep dark eyes.
‘Do you know where Arthur Cuttle’s been this last week?’ he said. Not a question but a foregone conclusion that she did not and would want to. ‘You might keep a special eye on him.’ Pity poor Arthur Cuttle, who had nothing to do with anything underhand but loyal service to his goblin mistress.
The glassy black eyes glittered back at him in the gloom. Jack smiled affably as he watched the cogs tick behind them, chewing on his words.
As she and Jack share a fair few connections, the wicked witch was wondering who he had been talking to and what they had said–the unfortunate consequence of living as a dishonourable criminal, without loyalty even to one’s own associates.
Jack adopted his best mysterious face. ‘Tell me about Mirabel Trotter,’ he said, ‘what business she has been about this week.’
The goblin’s ears pricked at the mention of Mrs Trotter. She was expecting something altogether trickier from him, and had no idea why Jack should be asking after her business. However, Mrs Trotter and Miss Spragg have their own private bone, which she is always keen to gnaw on. So, to his satisfaction, she indulged his enquiries. She wondered what to do for the best about Arthur Cuttle. And who exactly the woman downstairs might be. With the green ribbon round her neck.
Meanwhile in Shoreditch, Annie Atkins, showing more spine than we may give her credit for, is plotting her escape. Though she has been in the Shoreditch house not more than four hours she has already noticed that the keys are kept on a chain by bone-fingered Miss Craven, vile keeper of their prison, who sleeps downstairs with her glass eye open, and that the only window without bars is on the third floor: in fat Mrs Trotter’s private office. She resolved to keep her eyes peeled and her spirits up. The other girls are a Maureen O’Dowd, a pretty Irish thing, and a little Polish girl called Nina, who speaks about six words of English, none of which can help her, being things like ‘fire’ and ‘baby’. The most helpful words she has are ‘Thank you’, which she has no occasion whatsoever to use here. She is younger even than Annie Atkins and, like Maureen, is lost in confusion and will cry herself to sleep in the narrow beds to which they are shown that night, after the door has been bolted, while Annie lies awake, listening to their jailers carousing below.
It is rumoured that Mirabel Trotter once kept a man in her cellar for a month, chained to the wall, whom she flogged every morning until he begged, weeping, for his life and she threw him bleeding and penniless on to the street. His name was Sam Miller and he had a wife and three young children and owed Mrs Trotter twelve shillings. Foolishly, he had attempted to hide when he was unable to repay it, rather than explain his difficulties–which in truth would have made little difference to the treatment he received. She had to make an example of somebody once in a while to maintain her credibility, and that time it happened to be him.
He crawled home to find his family gone. The landlord had thrown them out a week before and, having survived upon the kindness of her neighbours for a day or two, Mrs Miller had turned to hawking the only asset she had left, believing her husband to be dead. He was a good man, not given to disappearing, she told her friends. He must have met some dreadful fate. They nodded sympathetic agreement but secretly thought not. The day before Sam Miller returned, his wife decided she could not carry on without him. She was a fragile soul and unable to bear the shame of her new situation. No one saw the family go. The next person to lay eyes on them was the lighterman who pulled them out of the Thames at Tilbury, still clinging together, little dead hands entwined in her hair.
Mrs Trotter has a finger in every pie in the criminal world. Her own mother sold her to a travelling show of wonders as she was such an extraordinarily large and odd-looking baby. She was trained to juggle and perform acrobatics in a troupe of girls, four of them, with strange faces and muscular arms, in yellow satin gowns. The Daffodil Sisters was their stage name and they went down very well all over London for a time.
After this brief but exhilarating career had run its course she made an important decision. She would never allow her circumstances to revert to their former humble state; on the contrary, she would make something important of herself–acquire position and power, pursue the high life she had tasted. This meant clearing seven hundred pounds per annum by her most conservative estimate. The only serious way to achieve such an ambition seemed to be through organised crime. Starting with minor robbery and prostitution–at which she enjoyed surprising success–she progressed to extortion and brothel-keeping, by virtue of the contacts she had made. Within a year she had twin sons by Alfie Skinner, notorious villain and scourge of Hatton Garden, kept fifteen girls on her books and protected the interests of several other local concerns for a monthly fee, helped by her associates the Wilsons and Mr Harry Harding. Thus she carved her own way through East London until she controlled a good part of it, vanquishing her enemies (not least Mr Trotter, a hapless little man with his trousers an inch or two short–she forgets why she married or, indeed, killed him: he rests peacefully under the vegetable bed at her country retreat near Harlow). She feels lonely sometimes, but she knows she will never have everything.
She and Miss Spragg tolerate each other, having separate patches. Miss Spragg’s line is more in goods: she can sell anything of quality, the finer the better, having more connections than the Queen herself, an unusual circumstance for someone who looks as if they live under the ground.
Jack emerged from the lair at last. He said nothing until they had left the crumbling kingdom behind.
‘What now?’ she said.
‘Annie’s in Shoreditch. Locked up tighter than Newgate. There’s only one person can help you with that.’
They happened upon Trixie May Turner at last, after dark, propping up the bar of the Grave Maurice. She embraced them both with exuberant fondness and bought them a drink.
‘You could do better!’ she said to Grace.
‘I can’t shake him off.’
‘Try rat poison.’
Jack revelled in this appreciation, knowing he was the handsomest cad in the parish. After these greetings were done they took a corner table and Trixie settled down to listen.
Trixie May Turner (which is not her real name) was born to a rich family, who disowned her, in shame and disgrace, pregnant by a bricklayer named Arthur Blakey, who was devilish charming. He stole her heart clean away, costing Trix her rightful inheritance of the family pile. Less than three minutes after she had imparted this news he was out of the door and away, never to return. This had happened twenty-three years ago last Wednesday, but though he was a distant memory that popped up less often than her birthday, Trixie could see his face still, and feel the pain, as sharp as if he had left yesterday. She had drunk like a whale at first to dull the sorrow but had tired of the company and reverted to her lively self: she likes to talk, and eat well, and knows everybody.
She finances her moderately hedonistic lifestyle through a steady business in opiates, which has gone along nicely since 1872, by way of a good Asian connection and a friend at Custom House, who manages to overlook the import tax on her goods. She knows Mirabel Trotter from long ago; they dine together often, sharing a taste for good wine and caviar. They never do business, or talk about it, which is why they get on so well, restricting their badinage to matters of entertainment. Vile Mrs Trotter has been seen, on occasion, gazing rapt as Trixie talks, like a little girl watching the Queen.
Stripe Wilkins seemed to enter the room without opening the door, as he always did, and hovered silently before his mistress, waiting for the word.
‘Jack Tallis was here not an hour ago,’ said the goblin Spragg. ‘He brought company. A tall woman, handsome, good teeth. I’ve not seen her before.’
He slid from the room, gone as she turned from the grimy window, without a squeak, through the keyhole, into the slippery street.
After the matter at hand was discussed, Jack and Grace sat down to roast beef and potatoes, at Trixie’s insistence; they must eat and there was nothing more to be done for now. Grace forced down her dinner and left at ten–Jack saw her to the door. His kiss was coarse; he tasted of stale beer. She shoved him back into the pub and went on her way.
London was slick with rain, black and grey. The streetlamps glowed sickly yellow on the Yorkshire stones, showing up the dirt and shit, the rotten leaves pasted flat, mixing slime and grit, sticky city.
Back in Bell Lane the family were tidying the rooms and folding their clothes as a surprise for Ma so she wouldn’t have to fuss at them or shout. Jake and Tom fell asleep after pie and mash at seven o’clock. When everything was nice Billy read to Daisy in bed and Charlie stoked a nice cosy fire. Twenty minutes passed peacefully so, till poor Billy burst suddenly into tears. He was racked with guilt about Annie and, though he had been holding it well all day, he cried his heart out, with Charlie’s arm around him.
‘Come on Billy,’ he said, ‘you musn’t blame yourself.’
‘It’s all my fault’ sobbed Billy.
‘No it ain’t.’
Daisy hugged his head and wiped away his tears. She was sure that Annie would be back at any moment.
‘It’ll all come out in the wash, Billy,’ she said. This made him laugh a bit and she was pleased to have cheered him up. Then she tucked him into bed next to her. Charlie stayed up to see his ma home, and tried to immerse himself in a new serial, which he could not, despite having a fancy for the heroine. He had read several pages without taking in a word when Grace came home, knocking softly on the window. As he opened the door Mrs Jacob’s curtain twitched across the way and prying eyes clocked Grace as she went in.
Charlie looked at her expectantly but Grace just shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of despair and exhaustion. Then she took off her boots and fell fast asleep with all her clothes on.